This past week marked the second annual Mission Week and proved to be even more successful than last year.

“Last year our original idea was to do a big service day and have some prayer activities that day, “junior Kelly Dineen said.  “But then Father Brendan talked to the Apostles of the Interior Life and they set up the entire weeks worth of activities. This year they couldn’t come so we had the whole week to do whatever we wanted.”

Needing to create their own events this year, BC Ministry asked other organizations, such as Servants of the Lord’s Service, Ravens Respect Life, FOCUS, and Hunger Coalition, to get involved as well.

“A lot of times we get a little overwhelmed with ‘be in this group, be in that group’ when really were all working toward the same ultimate goal which is bringing people closer to Christ,” said Dineen. “It was good to get all of those groups together to work on one thing.”

The impact of having so many different groups on campus work together was the number in the attendance of each event. There were at least twenty-five people  at  each event.

“It was good to see so many different people from so many different groups coming to the events that we put on, “ said Dineen. “I know that everyone has a crazy schedule so for new faces to come to these events, especially upper classmen, it really meant a lot.”

One of the other changes from last year was the dollar-a person collection.

“Our goal was to collect $1,354 by having student ambassadors go around with cups to collect a dollar from each student,” junior Kelly Gallagher.

Last year, they were able to raise $650 and as of Thursday, they had raised roughly $600.

“As of Thursday we had raised $600 and I’m not sure how much we ended up making after Friday,” said Dineen. “So I’m not sure that we met that but I think it’s something that we could definitely meet in the future.”

Another event that was new this year was the fast. Students started the fast on Thursday night and went until Friday night. Then Friday evening, Ned provided the students with deli sandwiches to end their fast.

“We had 100 people sign up for this event,” Gallagher said. “It was a great event that Emily Taber came up with and we were very successful.”

The students were also involved in going to different places around Atchison on Saturday morning to do various activities.

One of these activities was going to Country Mart in order to ask for donations for the Pregnancy Help Center Supply Drive and the Salvation Army.

“It was a fun experience to get involved in the community,” junior Whitney Danze said. “I mean it wasn’t that we did a lot of hard work, but when we told people at country mart what we were doing, they got excited. That made our job easy and I really enjoyed the experience.”

The results from the Country Mart Supply Drive were eight shopping carts full of groceries. The food items included Mac n Cheese, canned goods, diapers, notebooks and crayons.

Campus Ministry was happy with the results from this year’s Mission Week and looks forward to all the ones that are still to come.

“We’re so grateful for everyone who got involved this past week,” said Dineen. “It’s kind of cool to see all of the different groups getting together for service and it’s exciting to see how this will progress in the future.”